Tag Archives: great things

The top three reasons were People, Product and Opportunity. I met the people who make up our business and heard their stories from the past 18 years, learned about the platform and market leading status they had built in the UK, and saw that I could add value with my U.S. high growth business experience. I’ve been working with marketers, entrepreneurs and business owners for years across a series of different roles, and saw that I could apply what I’d learned from that and the start-up space to dotmailer’s U.S. operation. dotmailer has had clients in the U.S. for 12 years and we’re positioned to grow the user base of our powerful and easy-to-use platform significantly. I knew I could make a difference here, and what closed the deal for me was the people. Every single person I’ve met is deeply committed to the business, to the success of our customers and to making our solution simple and efficient. We’re a great group of passionate people and I’m proud to have joined the dotfamily.

Dan Morris, dotmailer’s EVP for North America in the new NYC office

Tell us a bit about your new role

dotmailer has been in business and in this space for more than 18 years. We were a web agency, then a Systems Integrator, and we got into the email business that way, ultimately building the dotmailer platform thousands of people use daily. This means we know this space better than anyone and we have the perfect solutions to align closely with our customers and the solutions flexible enough to grow with them. My role is to take all that experience and the platform and grow our U.S. presence. My early focus has been on identifying the right team to execute our growth plans. We want to be the market leader in the U.S. in the next three years – just like we’ve done in the UK – so getting the right people in the right spots was critical. We quickly assessed the skills of the U.S. team and made changes that were necessary in order to provide the right focus on customer success. Next, we set out to completely rebuild dotmailer’s commercial approach in the U.S. We simplified our offers to three bundles, so that pricing and what’s included in those bundles is transparent to our customers. We’ve heard great things about this already from clients and partners. We’re also increasing our resources on customer success and support. We’re intensely focused on ease of on-boarding, ease of use and speed of use. We consistently hear how easy and smooth a process it is to use dotmailer’s tools. That’s key for us – when you buy a dotmailer solution, we want to onboard you quickly and make sure you have all of your questions answered right away so that you can move right into using it. Customers are raving about this, so we know it’s working well.

What early accomplishments are you most proud of from your dotmailer time so far?

I’ve been at dotmailer for eight months now and I’m really proud of all we’ve accomplished together. We spent a lot of time assessing where we needed to restructure and where we needed to invest. We made the changes we needed, invested in our partner program, localized tech support, customer on-boarding and added customer success team members. We have the right people in the right roles and it’s making a difference. We have a commercial approach that is clear with the complete transparency that we wanted to provide our customers. We’ve got a more customer-focused approach and we’re on-boarding customers quickly so they’re up and running faster. We have happier customers than ever before and that’s the key to everything we do.

You’ve moved the U.S. team to a new office. Can you tell us why and a bit about the new space?

I thought it was very important to create a NY office space that was tied to branding and other offices around the world, and also had its own NY energy and culture for our team here – to foster collaboration and to have some fun. It was also important for us that we had a flexible space where we could welcome customers, partners and resellers, and also hold classes and dotUniversity training sessions. I’m really grateful to the team who worked on the space because it really reflects our team and what we care about. At any given time, you’ll see a training session happening, the team collaborating, a customer dropping in to ask a few questions or a partner dropping in to work from here. We love our new, NYC space.

What did you learn from your days in the start-up space that you’re applying at dotmailer?

The start-up space is a great place to learn. You have to know where every dollar is going and coming from, so every choice you make needs to be backed up with a business case for that investment. You try lots of different things to see if they’ll work and you’re ready to turn those tactics up or down quickly based on an assessment of the results. You also learn things don’t have to stay the way they are, and can change if you make them change. You always listen and learn – to customers, partners, industry veterans, advisors, etc. to better understand what’s working and not working. dotmailer has been in business for 18 years now, and so there are so many great contributors across the business who know how things have worked and yet are always keen to keep improving. I am constantly in listening and learning mode so that I can understand all of the unique perspectives our team brings and what we need to act on.

What are your plans for the U.S. and the sales function there?

On our path to being the market leader in the U.S., I’m focused on three things going forward: 1 – I want our customers to be truly happy. It’s already a big focus in the dotmailer organization – and we’re working hard to understand their challenges and goals so we can take product and service to the next level. 2 – Creating an even more robust program around partners, resellers and further building out our channel partners to continuously improve sales and customer service programs. We recently launched a certification program to ensure partners have all the training and resources they need to support our mutual customers. 3 – We have an aggressive growth plan for the U.S. and I’m very focused on making sure our team is well trained, and that we remain thoughtful and measured as we take the steps to grow. We want to always keep an eye on what we’re known for – tools that are powerful and simple to use – and make sure everything else we offer remains accessible and valuable as we execute our growth plans.

What are the most common questions that you get when speaking to a prospective customer?

The questions we usually get are around price, service level and flexibility. How much does dotmailer cost? How well are you going to look after my business? How will you integrate into my existing stack and then my plans for future growth? We now have three transparent bundle options with specifics around what’s included published right on our website. We have introduced a customer success team that’s focused only on taking great care of our customers and we’re hearing stories every day that tells me this is working. And we have all of the tools to support our customers as they grow and to also integrate into their existing stacks – often integrating so well that you can use dotmailer from within Magento, Salesforce or Dynamics, for example.

Can you tell us about the dotmailer differentiators you highlight when speaking to prospective customers that seem to really resonate?

In addition to the ones above – ease of use, speed of use and the ability to scale with you. With dotmailer’s tiered program, you can start with a lighter level of functionality and grow into more advanced functionality as you need it. The platform itself is so easy to use that most marketers are able to build campaigns in minutes that would have taken hours on other platforms. Our customer success team is also with you all the way if ever you want or need help. We’ve built a very powerful platform and we have a fantastic team to help you with personalized service as an extended part of your team and we’re ready to grow with you.

How much time is your team on the road vs. in the office? Any road warrior tips to share?

I’ve spent a lot of time on the road, one year I attended 22 tradeshows! Top tip when flying is to be willing to give up your seat for families or groups once you’re at the airport gate, as you’ll often be rewarded with a better seat for helping the airline make the family or group happy. Win win! Since joining dotmailer, I’m focused on being in office and present for the team and customers as much as possible. I can usually be found in our new, NYC office where I spend a lot of time with our team, in customer meetings, in trainings and other hosted events, sales conversations or marketing meetings. I’m here to help the team, clients and partners to succeed, and will always do my best to say yes! Once our prospective customers see how quickly and efficiently they can execute tasks with dotmailer solutions vs. their existing solutions, it’s a no-brainer for them. I love seeing and hearing their reactions.

I’m originally from Yorkshire in England, and grew up just outside York. I moved to the U.S. about seven years ago to join a very fast growing startup, we took it from 5 to well over 300 people which was a fantastic experience. I moved to NYC almost two years ago, and I love exploring this great city. There’s so much to see and do. Outside of dotmailer, my passion is cars, and I also enjoy skeet shooting, almost all types of music, and I love to travel – my goal is to get to India, Thailand, Australia and Japan in the near future.

We’re super-thrilled to say that it’s finally here: the MozCon 2015 Agenda. We have an outstanding lineup this year featuring topics ranging from technical SEO and email marketing to content strategy and digging into your creative side. All of our speakers are already gearing up to deliver top-notch and actionable tips. And if you still need your ticket:

Too often, the tone and promises of marketing don’t match those of the business itself. Dana will help you bring your brand identity together, both in-store and online, whether at a conference, on the radio, or in a meeting.

Dana DiTomaso likes to impart wisdom to help you turn a lot of marketing bullshit into real strategies to grow your business. After 10+ years, she’s (almost) seen it all. It’s true, Dana will meet with you and teach you the ways of the digital world, but she is also a fan of the random fact. Kick Point often celebrates “Watershed Wednesday” because of Dana’s diverse work and education background. In her spare time, Dana drinks tea and yells at the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

10:05-10:25amAM Break

10:25-11:25amHow To Do Content Strategy (Probably) with Kristina Halvorson

Put 10 people in a room and ask them to define “content strategy,” and you’ll likely get 10 different answers. Kristina will share her own tried-and-true approach!

Kristina Halvorson is widely recognized as one of the most important voices in content strategy. She is the founder of Brain Traffic, the coauthor of Content Strategy for the Web, and the founder of the Confab content strategy conferences.

11:25-12:10pmAn SEO’s Guide to the Insane World of Content with Matthew Brown

Find yourself arguing whether or not SEO is just great content? Matthew will talk through a strategic and tactical journey of content strategy from an SEO’s viewpoint and leave you with new tools and tactics.

Matthew Brown is on the Product Strategy and Design team at Moz, where he spends equal time on new products and staying out of the way. He enjoys bourbon and working on his upcoming novel, “Fifty Shades of Ginger” (look for it in 2019). Follow him at @MatthewJBrown for his special brand of hot takes.

12:10-1:40pmLunch

1:40-2:00pmDelightful Remarketing: How You Can Do It with Duane Brown

By focusing on the differences between remarketing and creating delightful remarketing, Duane will help you grow the revenue and profit for your brand.

Duane Brown is a digital marketer with 10 years’ experience having lived and worked in five cities across three continents. He’s currently at Unbounce. When not working, you can find Duane traveling to some far-flung location around the world to eat food and soak up the culture.

PPC is an easy testing ground for your SEO. Stephanie will explain how to better integrate them and leverage campaign data to influence SEO strategies.

Stephanie Wallace is Director of SEO at Nebo, a digital agency in Atlanta. She helps clients navigate the ever-changing world of SEO by understanding their audience and creating a digital experience that both the user and Google can appreciate.

2:20-2:40pmTracking Beyond the Pageview with Adrian Vender

Typical engagement analytics don’t tell the full story of how people interact with your website. Adrian will show you how to use Google Tag Manager to turbocharge your content tracking and custom reports.

Adrian Vender is the Director of Analytics at IMI and a general enthusiast of coding and digital marketing. He’s also a life-long drummer and lover of music.

2:40-3:00pmPM Break

3:00-3:35pmToo Busy to Do Good Work with Marta Turek

Don’t let your work suffer from being busy. Instead, let Marta show you the tactics to clean up your PPC processes to finally get more strategic.

Marta Turek holds seven years of experience in digital advertising, specializing in lead generation, and paid search marketing. Developing digital strategies and telling stories through data is what rocks her boat. She’s currently at ROI·DNA.

3:35-4:10pmOnline Personalization that Actually Works with Cara Harshman

Personalizing your marketing may be a daunting idea right now, but after Cara breaks it down, you’ll realize why embracing it early will be transformative, highly lucrative, addicting, and not creepy.

Cara Harshman tells stories at Optimizely. She was the second marketer to join and is now a Content Marketing Manager+Blog Editor. In 2012, she (openly) ghost-wrote A/B Testing the book, on behalf of the co-founders.

Marty is Founder of aimClear®. He was honored three years straight as a “Top 25 Most Influential PPC Expert”; was 2013 “US Search Personality of the Year”; is an acclaimed author; and fixture on the international digital marketing conference speaking circuit.

7:00-10:00pmMonday Night #MozCrawl

We’re having a pub crawl on Monday, official stops coming soon. You’ll be able to explore some of our favorite haunts and make some new friends. Go at your own pace, and visit the stops in any order. Spread across seven bars, each stop is sponsored by a trusted partner and one by us. You must bring your MozCon badge—for free drinks and light appetizers—and your US ID or passport. See you there!

Tuesday

8:00-9:00amBreakfast

9:00-9:45amSurviving Google: SEO in 2020 with Pete Meyers

Organic results are disappearing, replaced by Knowledge Graph, direct answers, new ad hybrids, and more. How can SEOs be ready for Google in five years?

Dr. Pete Meyers is Marketing Scientist for Moz, where he works on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past three years building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast project, and he curates the Google Algorithm History.

9:45-10:30amBecome a Mobile SEO Superhero with Cindy Krum

With Google’s algorithm mobile change, Cindy will walk you through the changes, what they mean for your site and its rankings, and what you should be focusing on going forward.

Cindy Krum is the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, and author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events.

In a data-driven world, Adam will pull you back to think again about your analytics, best practices, and how you report.

Adam Singer is Analytics Advocate at Google, startup adviser, investor, and blogger. He previously was director for a global consulting team and has provided digital strategy for brands in a variety of industries including marketing, technology, healthcare, and more.

Purna Virji is the founder and CEO of Purview Marketing, a boutique consulting firm helping companies of all sizes grow via search and content marketing. Purna is an avid traveler and speaks six languages (and can swear in 17!).

12:00-12:35pmDrive More Conversions with Lifecycle Email Campaigns with Tamara Gielen

Triggered emails can be powerful marketing. Tamara will lead you through data-driven decision making to improve your campaigns and connect with customers.

Based near Brussels, Belgium, Tamara Gielen is one of the world’s leading experts in email marketing with over 14 years of experience managing email marketing programs for international corporations.

With data from 112 publishers with 164+ billion page views, Marshall will dive into the challenges of tracking social and search campaigns. He’ll focus on history’s lessons and what’s happening with direct and mobile traffic in an app-heavy world.

Marshall Simmonds is the Founder of Define Media Group, the enterprise audience development company specializing in strategic search and social marketing. Define works with many of the most influential brands and networks in the world.

3:25-3:45pmPM Break

3:45-4:20pmBack to the Future with Local Search with Mary Bowling

Google’s model of our world now mirrors the physical world better than it ever has before. Learn how to meld the online and offline actions of your business for optimal Local Search success.

Mary Bowling’s been concentrating on helping businesses succeed with Local SEO since she got into this crazy biz in 2003. She’s a consultant at Optimized!, a partner at Ignitor Digital, a partner in LocalU, and a trainer and blogger for Search Engine News.

4:20-5:05pmThe Time to Do the Web Right Is Incredibly Short with Wil Reynolds

In “web time,” competitive advantage can be lost in an instant, speed matters. Wil shares how keep on the pulse of competitor agility and how to get things done to stay ahead of them.

Wil Reynolds – Director of Strategy, Seer Interactive – founded Seer with a focus on doing great things for its clients, team, and the community. His passion for driving and analyzing the impact that a site’s traffic has on the company’s bottom line has shaped SEO and digital marketing industries. Wil also actively supports the Covenant House.

7:00pm-10:00pmMozCon Ignite at Benaroya Hall

We’re thrilled to announce the addition of a networking and Ignite-style event for attendees on Tuesday night. Join us to meet—and—greet your fellow community members and hear them talk about their passion projects. Leave that notebook in your hotel and settle into some fun. Enjoy light appetizers and a couple of drinks on us.

Wednesday

Lexi shows you how to apply strategies used in emerging markets to grow the success of your PR, SEO, and content work from bathrooms to rock bands.

Lexi Mills is a PR SEO specialist, with over eight years experience working with both small firms and big brands. She has designed and implemented integrated PR, SEO, content, and social campaigns in the UK, Europe, and USA for B2B and B2C clients. She’s currently at DynamoPR.

10:15-10:50amUpside Down and Inside Out with Mig Reyes

Mig shares how to shake up your marketing projects by looking at your work through a lens of experiments and creativity.

Mig Reyes is a traditionally trained graphic designer who escaped advertising agency life, cut his teeth at the T-shirt powerhouse known as Threadless, and now helps lead branding, marketing and even a bit of product work at Basecamp.

10:50-11:10amAM Break

11:10-11:30amGet Hired to Do SEO with Ruth Burr Reedy

You dream in SEO—but all the SEO job descriptions require something you don’t have! Ruth Burr Reedy will teach you how to show employers you know your stuff, by building your personal brand with real-life examples of your SEO prowess.

Ruth Burr Reedy is the head of on-site SEO for BigWing Interactive, a full-service digital marketing agency in Oklahoma City, OK. At BigWing she manages a team doing on-site, technical and local SEO. Ruth has been working in SEO since 2006.

Too often we have design blinders on when running A/B tests, focusing only on things like button text. Chris will help you break through to find dramatic gains in your CRO efforts.

Chris Dayley is a digital marketing expert and owner of Dayley Conversion. His company provides full-service A/B testing for businesses, including design, development, and test execution.

11:50-12:10pmParole, Parole, Parole: Practical, Modern Keyword and Topical Research with Gianluca Fiorelli

Just using Keyword Planner and Google Suggest is a waste time. Gianluca will show you how keyword and topical research is more about culture, not guessing, and explore unusual sources and seldom used tool features to make your research more effective.

Moz Associate, official blogger for Stateofdigital.com and well-known International SEO and Inbound Strategist, Gianluca Fiorelli works in the Digital Marketing industry, but he still believes that he that he knows nothing.

12:10-1:40pmLunch

1:40-2:15pmThe Psychology of Social Media with Courtney Seiter

Courtney dives into the science of why people post, share, and build relationships on social media and how to create an even more irresistible social media experience for your audience.

Courtney Seiter examines social media and workplace culture at Buffer, and her writing has been published at TIME, Fast Company, Lifehacker, Inc., and more. She lives in Nashville, where she is a founder of Girls to the Moon, a leadership camp for girls.

2:15-2:50pmAstoundingly Useful Applications of Facebook Search for Marketers with David Mihm

Facebook has long neglected its potential as a local search giant, and as a result, its Graph Search product is an afterthought for too many marketers. David showcases Graph-powered insights for small-business marketers—with utility well beyond Facebook.

David Mihm has created and promoted search-friendly websites for clients of all sizes since the early 2000’s. David co-founded GetListed.org, which he sold to Moz in November 2012. He now serves as Moz’s Director of Local Search Strategy.

2:50-3:10pmPM Break

3:10-3:45pm(Check back soon; we’re still finalizing the details of this session!)

3:45-4:30pmOnsite SEO in 2015: An Elegant Weapon for a More Civilized Marketer with Rand Fishkin

SEO has come full circle as on-page SEO has returned to the forefront. Rand will share how and why on-site SEO is so important and show off uncommon tactics with powerful potential.

Do you love singing “I Love Rock n’ Roll”? How about bowling in some fancy shoes? Or are you a pool shark? Our after-party has a little something for everyone.

Chill with the new friends you’ve made, catch up with your old friends, and get to know the people you’ve only ever met online. We’ll provide heavy appetizers and plenty of beverages. This year’s assortment includes the MozCow Mule Mocktail, as well as well liquor, beer, house wine, soft drinks, and of course, plenty of our friend H2O.

Make sure to bring your MozCon badge and an ID (driver’s license or non-US passport). See you there!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

If eCommerce businesses hope to remain competitive with Amazon, eBay, big box brands, and other online retail juggernauts, they’ll need to learn how to conduct content marketing, lead generation, and contact nurturing as part of a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy.

First, I will discuss some of the ways most online retailers are approaching email from the bottom of the funnel upward, and why this needs to be turned around. Then we can explore how to go about doing this within the framework of “Inbound Marketing” for eCommerce businesses. Lastly, popular marketing automation and email marketing solutions are discussed in the context of inbound marketing for eCommerce.

Key differences between eCommerce and lead generation approaches to email

Different list growth strategies

Email acquisition sources differ greatly between lead gen. sites and online stores. The biggest driver of email acquisition for most eCommerce businesses are their shoppers, especially when the business doesn’t collect an email address for their contact database until the shopper provides it during the check-out process—possibly, not until the very end.

With most B2B/B2C lead gen. websites, the entire purpose of every landing page is to get visitors to submit a contact form or pick up the phone. Often, the price tag for their products or services is much higher than those of an eCommerce site or involves recurring payments. In other words, what they’re selling is more difficult to sell. People take longer to make those purchasing decisions. For this reason, leads—in the form of contact names and email addresses—are typically acquired and nurtured without having first become a customer.

Contacts vs. leads

Whether it is a B2B or B2C website, lead gen. contacts (called leads) are thought of as potential customers (clients, subscribers, patients) who need to be nurtured to the point of becoming “sales qualified,” meaning they’ll eventually get a sales call or email that attempts to convert them into a customer.

On the other hand, eCommerce contacts are often thought of primarily as existing customers to whom the marketing team can blast coupons and other offers by email.

Retail sites typically don’t capture leads at the top or middle of the funnel. Only once a shopper has checked out do they get added to the list. Historically, the buying cycle has been short enough that eCommerce sites could move many first-time visitors directly to customers in a single visit.But this has changed.

Unless your brand is very strong—possibly a luxury brand or one with an offline retail presence—it is probably getting more difficult (i.e. expensive) to acquire new customers. At the same time, attrition rates are rising. Conversion optimization helps by converting more bottom of the funnel visitors. SEO helps drive more traffic into the site, but mostly for middle-of-funnel (category page) and bottom-of-funnel (product page) visitors who may not also be price/feature comparison shopping, or are unable to convert right away because of device or time limitations.

Even savvy retailers publishing content for shoppers higher up in the funnel, such as buyer guides and reviews, aren’t getting an email address and are missing a lot of opportunities because of it.

Here’s a thought. If your eCommerce site has a 10 percent conversion rate, you’re doing pretty good by most standards. But what happened to the other 90 percent of those visitors? Will you have the opportunity to connect with them again? Even if you bump that up a few percentage points with retargeting, a lot of potential revenue has seeped out of your funnel without a trace.

I don’t mean to bash the eCommerce marketing community with generalizations. Most lead gen. sites aren’t doing anything spectacular either, and a lot of opportunity is missed all around.

There are many eCommerce brands doing great things marketing-wise. I’m a big fan ofCrutchfield for their educational resources targeting early-funnel traffic, and Neman Tools, Saddleback Leather and Feltraiger for the stories they tell. Amazon is hard to beat when it comes to scalability, product suggestions and user-generated reviews.

Sadly, most eCommerce sites (including many of the major household brands) still approach marketing in this way…

The ol’ bait n’ switch: promising value and delivering spam

Established eCommerce brands have gigantic mailing lists (compared with lead gen. counterparts), to whom they typically send out at least one email each week with “offers” like free shipping, $ off, buy-one-get-one, or % off their next purchase. The lists are minimally segmented, if at all. For example, there might be lists for repeat customers, best customers, unresponsive contacts, recent purchasers, shoppers with abandoned carts, purchases by category, etc.

The missing points of segmentation include which campaign resulted in the initial contact (sometimes referred to as a cohort) and—most importantly—the persona and buying cycle stage that best applies to each contact.

Online retailers often send frequent “blasts” to their entire list or to a few of the large segments mentioned above. Lack of segmentation means contacts aren’t receiving emails based on their interests, problems, or buying cycle stage, but instead, are receiving what they perceive as “generic” emails.

The result of these missing segments and the lack of overarching strategy looks something like this:

My, What a Big LIST You Have!

TIME reported in 2012 on stats from Responsys that the average online retailer sent out between five and six emails the week after Thanksgiving. Around the same time, the Wall Street Journal reported that the top 100 online retailers sent an average of 177 emails apiece to each of their contacts in 2011. Averaged out, that’s somewhere between three and four emails each week that the contact is receiving from these retailers.

The better to SPAM you with!

A 2014 whitepaper from SimpleRelevance titledEmail Fail: An In-Depth Evaluation of Top 20 Internet Retailer’s Email Personalization Capabilities (PDF) found that, while 70 percent of marketing executives believed personalization was of “utmost importance” to their business…

Speaking of email overload, the same report found that some major online retailers sent ten or more emails per week!

The result?

All too often, the eCommerce business will carry around big, dead lists of contacts who don’t even bother reading their emails anymore. They end up scrambling toward other channels to “drive more demand,” but because the real problems were never addressed, this ends up increasing new customer acquisition costs.

The cycle looks something like this:

Spend a fortune driving in unqualified traffic from top-of-the-funnel channels

Ignore the majority of those visitors who aren’t ready to purchase

Capture email addresses only for the few visitors who made a purchase

Spam the hell out of those people until they unsubscribe

Spend a bunch more money trying to fill the top of the funnel with even more traffic

It’s like trying to fill your funnel with a bucket full of holes, some of them patched with band-aids.

The real problems

Lack of a cohesive strategy across marketing channels

Lack of a cohesive content strategy throughout all stages of the buying cycle

Lack of gated content that provides enough value to early-funnel visitors to get them to provide their email address

So, what’s the answer?

Inbound marketing allows online retailers to stop competing with Amazon and other “price focused” competitors with leaky funnels, and to instead focus on:

Persona-based content marketing campaigns designed to acquire email addresses from high-quality leads (potential customers) by offering them the right content for each stage in their buyer’s journey

A robust marketing automation system that makes true personalization scalable

Automated contact nurturing emails triggered by certain events, such as viewing specific content, abandoning their shopping cart, adding items to their wish list or performing micro-conversions like downloading a look book

Intelligent SMM campaigns that match visitors and customers with social accounts by email addresses, interests and demographics—as well as social monitoring

Hyper-segmented email contact lists to support the marketing automation described above, as well as to provide highly-customized email and shopping experiences

Cross-channel, closed loop reporting to provide a complete “omnichannel” view of online marketing efforts and how they assist offline conversions, if applicable

Each of these areas will be covered in more detail below. First, let’s take a quick step back and define what it is we’re talking about here.

Inbound marketing: a primer

A lot of people think “inbound marketing” is just a way some SEO agencies are re-cloaking themselves to avoid negative associations with search engine optimization. Others think it’s synonymous with “internet marketing.” I think it goes more like this:

Inbound marketing is to Internet marketing as SEO is to inbound marketing: One piece of a larger whole.

There are many ways to define inbound marketing. A cursory review of definitions from several trusted sources reveals some fundamental similarities :

Rand Fishkin

“Inbound Marketing is the practice of earning traffic and attention for your business on the web rather than buying it or interrupting people to get it. Inbound channels include organic search, social media, community-building content, opt-in email, word of mouth, and many others. Inbound marketing is particularly powerful because it appeals to what people are looking for and what they want, rather than trying to get between them and what they’re trying to do with advertising. Inbound’s also powerful due to the flywheel-effect it creates. The more you invest in Inbound and the more success you have, the less effort required to earn additional benefit.”

Mike King

“Inbound Marketing is a collection of marketing activities that leverage remarkable content to penetrate earned media channels such as Organic Search, Social Media, Email, News and the Blogosphere with the goal of engaging prospects when they are specifically interested in what the brand has to offer.”

This quote is from 2012, and is still just as accurate today. It’s from anInbound.org comment thread where you can also see many other takes on it from the likes of Ian Lurie, Jonathon Colman, and Larry Kim.

Inflow

“Inbound Marketing is a multi-channel, buyer-centric approach to online marketing that involves attracting, engaging, nurturing and converting potential customers from wherever they are in the buying cycle.”

Wikipedia

“Inbound marketing refers to marketing activities that bring visitors in, rather than marketers having to go out to get prospects’ attention. Inbound marketing earns the attention of customers, makes the company easy to be found, and draws customers to the website by producing interesting content.”

Hubspot

“Instead of the old outbound marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and praying for leads, inbound marketing focuses on creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product, where they naturally want to be.”

Running your first eCommerce inbound marketing campaign

Audience personas—priority no. 1

The magic happens when retailers begin to hyper-segment their list based on buyer personas and other relevant information (i.e. what they’ve downloaded, what they’ve purchased, if they abandoned their cart…). This all starts with audience research to develop personas. If you need more information on persona development, try these resources:

Persona Driven Marketing (PDF) chapter of Inbound Commerce: How to Sell Better Than Amazon by Sam Mallikarjunan and Mike Ewing

Once personas are developed, retailers should choose one on which to focus. A complete campaign strategy should be developed around this persona, with the aim of providing the “right value” to them at the “right time” in their buyer’s journey.

Ready to get started?

We’ve developed a quick-start guide in the form of a checklist for eCommerce marketers who want to get started with inbound marketing, which you can access below.

Hands-on experience running one campaign will teach you more about inbound marketing than a dozen articles. My advice: Just do one. You will make mistakes. Learn from them and get better each time.

Example inbound marketing campaign

Below is an example of how a hypothetical inbound marketing campaign might play out, assuming you have completed all of the steps in the checklist above. Imagine you handle marketing for an online retailer of high-end sporting goods.

AT Hiker Tommy campaign: From awareness to purchase

When segmenting visitors and customers for a “high-end sporting goods / camping retailer” based on the East Coast, you identified a segment of “Trail Hikers.” These are people with disposable income who care about high-quality gear, and will pay top dollar if they know it is tested and reliable. The top trail on their list of destinations is theAppalachian Trail (AT).

Top of the Funnel: SEO & Strategic Content Marketing

Tommy’s first action is to do “top of the funnel” research from search engines (one reason why SEO is still so important to a complete inbound marketing strategy).

A search for “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” turns up your article titled “What NOT to Pack When Hiking the Appalachian Trail,” which lists common items that are bulky/heavy, and highlights slimmer, lighter alternatives from your online catalog.

It also highlights the difference between cheap gear and the kind that won’t let you down on your 2,181 mile journey through the wilderness of Appalachia, something you learned was important to Tommy when developing his persona. This allows you to get the company’s value proposition of “tested, high-end, quality gear only” in front of readers very early in their buyer’s journey—important if you want to differentiate your site from all of the retailers racing Amazon to the bottom of their profit margins.

So far you have yet to make “contact” with AT Hiker Tommy. The key to “acquiring” a contact before the potential customer is ready to make a purchase is to provide something of value to that specific type of person (i.e. their persona) at that specific point in time (i.e. their buying cycle stage).

In this case, we need to provide value to AT Hiker Tommy while he is getting started on his research about hiking the Appalachian Trail. He has an idea of what gear not to bring, as well as some lighter, higher-end options sold on your site. At this point, however, he is not ready to buy anything without researching the trail more. This is where retailers lose most of their potential customers. But not you. Not this time…

On the “What NOT to Pack When Hiking the Appalachian Trail” article (and probably several others), you have placed a call-to-action (CTA) in the form of a button that offers something like:

Download our Free 122-page Guide to Hiking the Appalachian Trail

This takes Tommy to a landing page showcasing some of the quotes from the book, and highlighting things like:

“We interviewed over 50 ‘thru-hikers’ who completed the AT and have curated and organized the best first-hand tips, along with our own significant research to develop a free eBook that should answer most of your questions about the trail.”

By entering their email address potential customers agree to allow you to send them the free PDF downloadable guide to hiking the AT, and other relevant information about hiking.

An automated email is sent with a link to the downloadable PDF guide, and several other useful content links, such as “The AT Hiker’s Guide to Gear for the Appalachian Trail”—content designed to move Tommy further toward the purchase of hiking gear.

If Tommy still has not made a purchase within the next two weeks, another automated email is sent asking for feedback about the PDF guide (providing the link again), and to again provide the link to the “AT Hiker’s Guide to Gear…” along with a compelling offer just for him, perhaps “Get 20% off your first hiking gear purchase, and a free wall map of the AT!”

Having Tommy’s email address also allows you to hyper-target him on social channels, while also leveraging his initial visit to initiate retargeting efforts.

Bottom of the funnel: Email nurturing & strategic, segmented offers

Eventually Tommy makes a purchase, and he may or may not receive further emails related to this campaign, such as post-purchase emails for reviews, up-sells and cross-sells.

Upon checkout, Tommy checked the box to opt-in to weekly promotional emails. He is now on multiple lists. Your marketing automation system will automatically update Tommy’s status from “Contact” or lead, to “Customer” and potentially remove or deactivate him from the marketing automation system database. This is accomplished either by default integration features, or with the help of integration tools likeZapier and IFTTT.

You have now nurtured Tommy from his initial research on Google all the way to his first purchase without ever having sent a spammy newsletter email full of irrelevant coupons and other offers. However, now that he is a loyal customer, Tommy finds value in these bottom-of-funnel email offers.

And this is just the start

Every inbound marketing campaign will have its own mix of appropriate channels. This post has focused mostly on email because acquiring the initial permission to contact the person is what fuels most of the other features offered by marketing automation systems, including:

Personalization of offers and other content on the site.

Knowing exactly which visitors are interacting on social media

Knowing where visitors and social followers are in the buying cycle and which persona best represents them, among other things.

Smart forms that don’t require visitors to put in the same information twice and allow you to build out more detailed profiles of them over time.

Blogging platforms that tie into email and marketing automation systems

Analytics data that isn’t blocked by Google and is tied directly to real people.

Three more things…

If you can figure out a way to get Tommy to “log in” when he comes to your site, the personalization possibilities are nearly limitless.

The persona above is based on a real customer segment. I named it after my friend Tommy Bailey, who actually did write the eBookGuide to Hiking the Appalachian Trail, featured in the image above.

This Moz post is part of an inbound marketing campaign targeting eCommerce marketers, a segment Inflow identified while building out our own personas. Our hope, and the whole point of inbound marketing, is that it provides value to you.

Current state of the inbound marketing industry

Inbound has, for the the most part, been applied to businesses in which the website objective is to generate leads for a sales team to follow-up with and close the deal. An examination of various marketing automation platforms—a key component of scalable inbound marketing programs—highlights this issue.

Popular marketing automation systems

Most of the major marketing automation systems can be be used very effectively as the backbone of an inbound marketing program for eCommerce businesses. However, only one of them (Silverpop) has made significant efforts to court the eCommerce market with content and out-of-box features. The next closest thing is Hubspot, so let’s start with those two:

Out of all the marketing automation platforms on this list, HubSpot is the most capable of handling “inbound marketing” campaigns from start to finish. This should come as no surprise, given the phrase is credited toBrian Halligan, HubSpot’s co-founder and CEO.

While they don’t specifically cater to eCommerce marketing needs with the same gusto they give to lead gen. marketing, HubSpot does havean eCommerce landing page and a demo landing page for eCommerce leads, which suggests that their own personas include eCommerce marketers. Additionally, there is some good content on their blog written specifically for eCommerce.

HubSpot has allowed some key partners to develop plug-ins that integrate with leading eCommerce platforms. This approach works well with curation, and is not dissimilar to how Google handles Android or Apple handles their approved apps.

TheMagento Connector for HubSpot, which costs $80 per month, was developed by EYEMAGiNE, a creative design firm for eCommerce websites. A similar HubSpot-approved third-party integration is on the way for Bigcommerce.

Another eCommerce integration for Hubspot is a Shopify plug-in calledHubShoply, which was developed by Groove Commerce and costs $100 per month.

You can also use HubSpot’s native integration capabilities withZapier to sync data between HubSpot and most major eCommerce SaaS vendors, including the ones above, as well as WooCommerce, Shopify, PayPal, Infusionsoft and more. However, the same could be said of some of the other marketing automation platforms, and using these third-party solutions can sometimes feel like fitting a square peg into a round hole.

HubSpot can and does handle inbound marketing for eCommerce websites. All of the features are there, or easy enough to integrate. But let’s put some pressure on them to up their eCommerce game even more. The least they can do is put an eCommerce link in the footer:

Despite the lack of clear navigation to their eCommerce content, HubSpot seems to be paying more attention to the needs of eCommerce businesses than the rest of the platforms below.

Nothing about Marketo’s in-house marketing strategy suggests “Ecommerce Director Bob” might be one of their personas. The description for each oftheir marketing automation packages (from Spark to Enterprise) mentions that it is “for B2B” websites.

Driving Sales could apply to a retail business so I clicked on the link. Nope. Clearly, this is for lead generation.

Passing “purchase-ready leads” over to your “sales reps” is a good example of the type of language used throughout the site.

Make no mistake, Marketo is a top-notch marketing automation platform. Powerful and clean, it’s a shame they don’t launch a full-scale eCommerce version of their core product. In the meantime, there’s theMagento Integration for Marketo Plug-in developed by an agency out of Australia called Hoosh Marketing.

I’ve never used this integration, but it’s part of Marketo’sLaunchPoint directory, which I imagine is vetted, and Hoosh seems like a reputable agency.

Theirpricing page is blurred and gated, which is annoying, but perhaps they’ll come on here and tell everyone how much they charge.

As with all others except Silverpop, the Marketo navigation provides no easy paths to landing pages that would appeal to “Ecommerce Director Bob.”

Eloqua, now part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud (OMC), has a landing pagefor the retail industry, on which they proclaim:

“Retail marketers know that the path to lifelong loyalty and increased revenue goes through building and growing deep client relationships.”

Since when did retail marketers start calling customers clients?

The Integration tab on OMC’s “…Retail.html” page helpfully informs eCommerce marketers that their sales teams can continue using CRM systems like SalesForce and Microsoft Dynamics but doesn’t mention anything about eCommerce platforms and other SaaS solutions for eCommerce businesses.

Others

There are many other players in this arena. Though I haven’t used them yet, three I would love to try out areSharpSpring, Hatchbuck and Act-On. But none of them appear to be any better suited to handle the concerns of eCommerce websites.

Where there’s a gap, there’s opportunity

The purpose of the section above wasn’t to highlight deficiencies in the tools themselves, but to illustrate a gap in who they are being marketed to and developed for.

So far, most of your eCommerce competitors probably aren’t using tools like these because they are not marketed to by the platforms, and don’t know how to apply the technology to online retail in a way that would justify the expense.

The thing is, a tool is just a tool

In order to “do inbound marketing,” a marketing automation system isn’t even strictly necessary (in theory). They just help make the activities scalable for most businesses.

They also bring a lot of different marketing activities under one roof, which saves time and allows data to be moved and utilized between channels and systems. For example, what a customer is doing on social could influence the emails they receive, or content they see on your site. Here are some potential uses for most of the platforms above:

Automated marketing uses

Personalized abandoned cart emails

Post-purchase nurturing/reorder marketing

Welcome campaigns for the newsletter (other free offer) signups

Winback campaigns

Lead-nurturing email campaigns for cohorts and persona-based segments

Content marketing uses

Optimized, strategic blogging platforms, and frameworks

Landing pages for pre-transactional/educational offers or contests

Social media reporting, monitoring, and publishing

Personalization of content and user experience

Reporting uses

Revenue reporting (by segment or marketing action)

Attribution reporting (by campaign or content)

Assuming you don’t have the budget for a marketing automation system, but already have a good email marketing platform, you can still get started with inbound marketing. Eventually, however, you may want to graduate to a dedicated marketing automation solution to reap the full benefits.

Email marketing platforms

Most of the marketing automation systems claim to replace your email marketing platform, while many email marketing platforms claim to be marketing automation systems. Neither statement is completely accurate.

Marketing automation systems, especially those created specifically for the type of “inbound” campaigns described above, provide a powerful suite of tools all in one place. On the other hand, dedicated email platforms tend to offer “email marketing” features that are better, and more robust, than those offered by marketing automation systems. Some of them are also considerably cheaper—such asMailChimp—but those are often light on even the email-specific features for eCommerce.

A different type of campaign

Email “blasts” in the form of B.O.G.O., $10 off or free shipping offers can still be very successful in generating incremental revenue boosts — especially for existing customers and seasonal campaigns.

The conversion rate on a 20% off coupon sent to existing customers, for instance, would likely pulverize the conversion rate of an email going out to middle-of-funnel contacts with a link to content (at least with how CR is currently being calculated by email platforms).

Inbound marketing campaigns can also offer quick wins, but they tend to focus mostly on non-customers after the first segmentation campaign (a campaign for the purpose of segmenting your list, such as an incentivised survey). This means lower initial conversion rates, but long-term success with the growth of new customers.

Here’s a good bet if works with your budget: Rely on a marketing automation system for inbound marketing to drive new customer acquisition from initial visit to first purchase, while using a good email marketing platform to run your “promotional email” campaigns to existing customers.

If you have to choose one or the other, I’d go with a robust marketing automation system.

Some of the most popular email platforms used by eCommerce businesses, with a focus on how they handle various Inbound Marketing activities, include:

This platform builds in features like abandoned cart recovery, advanced email list segmentation and automated email workflows that nurture contacts over time.

They also offer a host of eCommerce-relatedfeatures that you just don’t get with marketing automation systems like Hubspot and Marketo. This includes easy integration with a variety of eCommerce platforms like ATG, Demandware, Magento, Miva Merchant, Mozu and MarketLive, not to mention apps for coupons, product recommendations, social shopping and more. Integration with enterprise eCommerce platforms is one reason why Bronto is seen over and over again when browsing the Internet Retailer Top 500 reports.

On the other hand, Bronto—like the rest of these email platforms—doesn’t have many of the features that assist with content marketing outside of emails. As an “inbound” marketing automation system, it is incomplete because it focuses almost solely on one channel: email.

Another juggernaut in eCommerce email marketing platforms, Vertical Response, has even fewer inbound-related features than Bronto, though it is a good email platform with a free version that includes up to 1,000 contacts and 4,000 emails per month (i.e. 4 emails to a full list of 1,000).

Out of the established email platforms for eCommerce, Listrak may do the best job at positioning themselves as a full inbound marketing platform.

Listrak’s value proposition is that they’re an “Omnichannel” solution. Everything is all in one “Single, Integrated Digital Marketing Platform for Retailers.” The homepage image promises solutions for Email, Mobile, Social, Web and In-Store channels.

I haven’t had the opportunity to work with Listrak yet, but would love to hear feedback in the comments on whether they could handle the kind of persona-based content marketing and automated email nurturing campaigns described in the example campaign above.

Key takeaways

Congratulations for making this far! Here are a few things I hope you’ll take away from this post:

There is a lot of opportunity right now for eCommerce sites to take advantage of marketing automation systems and robust email marketing platforms as the infrastructure to run comprehensive inbound marketing campaigns.

There is a lot of opportunity right now for marketing automation systems to develop content and build in eCommerce-specific features to lure eCommerce marketers.

Inbound marketing isn’t email marketing, although email is an important piece to inbound because it allows you to begin forming lasting relationships with potential customers much earlier in the buying cycle.

To see the full benefits of inbound marketing, you should focus on getting the right content to the right person at the right time in their shopping journey. This necessarily involves several different channels, including search, social and email. One of the many benefits of marketing automation systems is their ability to track your efforts here across marketing channels, devices and touch-points.

Tools, resources, and further reading

There is a lot of great content on the topic of Inbound marketing, some of which has greatly informed my own understanding and approach. Here are a few resources you may find useful as well.

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Considering coming to MozCon, July 13-15 in Seattle this year? Maybe you’re on the fence because you’re not sure what’s going on, and most importantly, what our amazing speakers are talking about? I hear you, MozCon fans! While the agenda is still being finalized, we wanted to give you a sneak preview.

If you’re like “oh, shit, I forgot to buy my MozCon ticket!,” do so now:

Adam Singer is Analytics Advocate at Google, startup adviser, investor, and blogger. He previously was director for a global consulting team and has provided digital strategy for brands in a variety of industries including marketing, technology, healthcare, and more.

Topic: Digital Analytics: People, Process, Platform

In a data-driven world, Adam will pull you back to think again about your analytics, best practices, and how you report.

Cindy Krum is the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, and author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events.

Topic: Become a Mobile SEO Superhero

With Google’s algorithm mobile change, Cindy will walk you through the changes, what they mean for your site and its rankings, and what you should be focusing on going forward.

Courtney Seiter examines social media and workplace culture at Buffer, and her writing has been published at TIME, Fast Company, Lifehacker, Inc., and more. She lives in Nashville, where she is a founder ofGirls to the Moon, a leadership camp for girls.

Topic: The Psychology of Social Media

Courtney dives into the science of why people post, share, and build relationships on social media and how to create an even more irresistible social media experience for your audience.

Whether at a conference, on the radio, or in a meeting, Dana DiTomaso likes to impart wisdom to help you turn a lot of marketing bullshit into real strategies to grow your business. Dana is also a fan of the random fact. Kick Point often celebrates “Watershed Wednesday” because of her diverse work and education background. In her spare time, Dana drinks tea and yells at the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

Topic: How to Make Your Marketing Match Your Reality

Too often, the tone and promises of marketing don’t match those of the business itself. Dana will help you bring your brand identity together, both in-store and online.

David Mihm has created and promoted search-friendly websites for clients of all sizes since the early 2000’s. David co-founded GetListed.org, which he sold to Moz in November 2012. He now serves as Moz’s Director of Local Search Strategy.

Facebook has long neglected its potential as a local search giant, and as a result, its Graph Search product is an afterthought for too many marketers. David showcases Graph-powered insights for small-business marketers—with utility well beyond Facebook.

The original conversion copywriter, Joanna Wiebe is the cofounder of Snap and Copy Hackers, where startups learn to convert like mofos. She is a natural-born thief who steals messages from the mouths of customers and turns their words into higher-converting copy.

Kristina Halvorson is widely recognized as one of the most important voices in content strategy. She is the founder of Brain Traffic, the coauthor of Content Strategy for the Web, and the founder of the Confab content strategy conferences.

Topic: How To Do Content Strategy (Probably)

Put 10 people in a room and ask them to define “content strategy,” and you’ll likely get 10 different answers. Kristina will share her own tried-and-true approach!

Lexi Mills is a PR SEO specialist, with over eight years experience working with both small firms and big brands. She has designed and implemented integrated PR, SEO, content, and social campaigns in the UK, Europe, and USA for B2B and B2C clients.

Topic: Marketing Innovations: Creative PR, Content, and SEO StrategiesLexi shows you how to apply strategies used in emerging markets to grow the success of your PR, SEO, and content work from bathrooms to rock bands.

Marshall Simmonds is the Founder of Define Media Group, the enterprise audience development company specializing in strategic search and social marketing. Define works with many of the most influential brands and networks in the world.

Topic: Dark Search and Social—Run Rabbit Run!

With data from 112 publishers with 164+ billion page views, Marshall will dive into the challenges of tracking social and search campaigns. He’ll focus on history’s lessons and what’s happening with direct and mobile traffic in an app-heavy world.

Marta holds seven years of experience in digital advertising, specializing in lead generation, and paid search marketing. Developing digital strategies and telling stories through data is what rocks her boat.

Topic: Too Busy to Do Good Work

Don’t let your work suffer from being busy. Instead, let Marta show you the tactics to clean up your PPC processes to finally get more strategic.

Matthew runs Special Projects at Moz. This has been going on for two years, and we’re still not totally sure what that means.

Topic: An SEO’s Guide to the Insane World of Content

Find yourself arguing whether or not SEO is just great content? Matthew will talk through a strategic and tactical journey of content strategy from an SEO’s viewpoint and leave you with new tools and tactics.

Mig Reyes is a traditionally trained graphic designer who escaped advertising agency life, cut his teeth at the T-shirt powerhouse known as Threadless, and now helps lead branding, marketing and even a bit of product work at Basecamp.

Topic title TBD, but Mig will be focusing on putting your creative energies into your marketing.

Dr. Pete Meyers is Marketing Scientist for Moz, where he works on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past three years building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast project, and he curates the Google Algorithm History.

Topic: Surviving Google: SEO in 2020

Organic results are disappearing, replaced by Knowledge Graph, direct answers, new ad hybrids, and more. How can SEOs be ready for Google in five years?

Purna is the founder and CEO of Purview Marketing, a boutique consulting firm helping companies of all sizes grow via search and content marketing. Purna is an avid traveler and speaks six languages (and can swear in 17!).

Wil Reynolds founded Seer with a focus on doing great things for its clients, team, and the community. His passion for driving and analyzing the impact that a site’s traffic has on the company’s bottom line has shaped SEO and digital marketing industries. Wil also actively supports the Covenant House.

Topic: The Time to Do the Web Right Is Incredibly Short

In “web time,” competitive advantage can be lost in an instant, speed matters. Wil shares how keep on the pulse of competitor agility and how to get things done to stay ahead of them.

In addition to fabulous days full of great content from extraordinary minds, we’re also cooking up three nights of great fun, networking, and MozCon love. Monday night, our partners will be hosting a pub crawl in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood with special prizes for those who hit every spot. Tuesday night, we’re doing a networking event, featuring you, the community, and your passions besides marketing. Details to come as they’re finalized! And finally, Wednesday night, we’ll say ‘see you next year’ with our traditional party at the Garage: karaoke, bowling, pool, and chilling with friends.

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A few weeks ago, I attended a breakfast meeting with a bunch of entrepreneurs in the technology, space (yes, space travel), software and engineering industry. I felt so blown away by the incredible talent of the speakers. You know, there are people out there building things, like private satellite networks, bio printing facilities, quantum computers and self-driving cars. I was completely transfixed by the incredibly future facing, innovative and exceptionally inventive group in front of me. I also immediately wished I’d worked a little harder in my twenties.

After the presentations, one of the questions that came up during the Q&A session was: “what’s the next big thing?”

Wow. Have you ever thought about “the next big thing”?

Part of the magic of predicting innovation is that it’s really, really hard to get right. Those that can accurately predict the future (in my humble opinion) are those that tend to understand how people will respond to an idea once they’re exposed to it. I think predicting this is a very special skill indeed.

Then again, we’re expected to be able to predict the outcome of our marketing, all the time. While predicting it is one thing, making it happen it is a whole different ball game.

Competition for the attention of our customers is getting tougher

In our industry, when you really boil down what it is we do, we’re fixing things, making things, or we’re communicating things.

Most of the time, we’re building content that communicates: ideas, stories, news and guidance–you get the idea. The problem is, no matter which vertical you work in, we’re all competing for something: the attention of our customers.

As our customers get smarter, that competition is getting tougher and tougher.

The most successful marketers in our industry all have a special trait in common. They are good at finding new ways to communicate ideas. Take a look at classic presentationslike this from Ross Hudgens to see just how powerful it can be to observe, imitate and develop an idea with astounding viral reach.

I particularly enjoy the idea of taking a piece of content and making improvements, be it through design, layout or simply updating what’s there. I like it because it’s actually pretty easy to do, and there’s growing evidence of it happening all over the Internet. Brands are taking a second look at how they’re developing their content to appeal to a wider audience, or to appeal to a viral audience (or both!).

For example; take a look at this beautifultravel guide to Vietnam (credit: travelindochina.com) or this long form guide to commercial property insurance (credit: Towergate Insurance / Builtvisible.com) for examples of brands in competitive verticals developing their existing content. In verticals where ordinary article content has been done to death, redeveloping the medium itself feels like an important next step.

In my opinion though, you don’t have to be able to learn how to build your own site or be a developer. All you have to do is learn the vocabulary and build a broad understanding of how things work in a browser. I actually think we all need to be doing this, right now. Why?

We need more innovation in content marketing

I think our future depends on our industry’s ability to innovate. Of course, you still need to have your basics in place. We’ll always beT-Shaped marketers, executing a bit of technical SEO here, a bit of content strategy there. But, we’re all SEOs and we know we need to acquire links, build audiences and generally think big about our ambitions. When your goal is to attract new followers, fans, links, and garner shares in their thousands, you need to do something pretty exciting to attract attention to yourself.

The vocabulary of content development

I’ve designed this post to be a primer on more advanced features found in innovative content development. My original MozCon 2014 presentation was designed to educate on some of the technologies we should be aware of in our content development projects and the process we follow to build things. We’ll save process for another post (shout in the comments if you think that would be useful!) and focus on the “what” for now.

At Builtvisible, we’re working hard on extending our in-house content development capabilities. We learn through sharing amazing examples with each other. Our policy is to always attempt to deconstruct how something might have been developed, that way, we’re learning. Some of the things we see on the web are amazing–they deserve so much respect for the talent and the skills that surface the content.

Here are some examples that I think demonstrate some of the most useful types of approach for content marketers. I hope that these help as much as they’ve helped us, and I hope you can form a perspective of what innovative features look like in more advanced content development. Of course, do feel welcome to share your own examples in the comments, too! The more, the merrier!

The story of EBoy

The consistent styling (as well as the beautifully written content) is excellent. Technically speaking, perhaps the most clever and elegant feature is the zoom of the image positioned on the Z axis in a <canvas> container (more on this in a moment).

An event listener (jQuery) helps size the canvas appropriate to the browser window size and the z axis position shifts on scroll to create an elegant zoom effect.

The colorization feature takes advantage of the power of the canvas element. In this case, the color version of the image is applied to the canvas as a background image, with the black and white version on a layer above. Clicking (or touching, on mobile) erases portions of the top image, revealing the color version underneath.

Chrome Experiments: Globe

Globe is “simple” global data visualization of the Earth’s population growth over a set range of dates. The 3d visualization based inwebGL: a JavaScript API for rendering interactive 3D graphics and 2D graphics within any compatible web browser without the use of plug-ins.

If you’d like to see more examples of webGL in action, take a look atChrome Experiments. Don’t worry, this stuff works in the latest versions of Firefox and IE, too.

Polygon’s PS4 Review

You might have seen me cover this long form concept over at Builtvisible. Polygon’s Playstation 4 review is a fully featured “long form” review of Sony’s much loved gaming machine. The bit that I love is the SVG visualizations:

That line tracing animation you see is known aspath animation. Essentially the path attribute in the SVG’s XML can be manipulated in the DOM with a little jQuery. What you’ll get is a pretty snazzy animation to keep your users eyes fixated on your content and yet another nice little effect to keep eyeballs engaged.

My favourite example of SVG execution is Lewis Lehe’sGridlocks and Bottlenecks. Gridlocks is a AngularJS, d3.js based visualization of the surprisingly technical and oft-misunderstood “gridlock” and “bottleneck” events in road traffic management.

I have a short vocabulary list that I expect our team to be able to explain (certainly these questions come up in an interview with us!). I think that if you can explain what these things are, as a developing content marketer you’re way ahead of the curve:

Innovation in content is such a huge topic but I realize I’ve run out of space (this is already a 1,400 word post) for now.

In my follow up, I’d like to talk about how to plan your content when it’s a little more extensive than just an article, give you some tips on how to work with (or find!) a developer, and how to make the most of every component in your content to get the most from your marketing efforts.

Until then, I’d love to see your own examples of great content and questions in the comments!

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Hey there Mozzers. This is a collaborative post between myself and a good friend of mine, Mathew Sweezey. Sweezey is the head of B2B Marketing Thought Leadership at Salesforce.com and he knows a whole lot about marketing. We’re excited to share this post with you and look forward to your feedback in the comments below.

In 1999, AdAge released its list of most influential advertising campaigns of all time. At the top of the list was ‘Think Small,’ a campaign that introduced the Volkswagen Beetle to America. It was given top honors not because of its graphical juxtaposition, or its catchy copy, but rather its honest approach. It was the first major campaign to go against what the American consumer said they wanted. When Chevy was telling consumers bigger was better, Volkswagen acknowledged their shortcomings and advised consumers to, ‘Think Small.’

When a brand is able to make a sincere connection with a consumer, something incredibly powerful happens. Beyond mere fleeting impact, that moment of connection provides a foundation for long-term advocacy, loyalty, and a sustainable bottom line.

The average consumer in today’s market is exposed to more than 5,000 advertising messages per day, wields more computing power in their hand than NASA had to land a man on the moon, and can make a decision about your website in 1/20 of a second. Consumers are overwhelmed with images, and sales pitches and desire a more emotional connection from the companies they support. With this amount of noise, and such fickle consumers, companies who are able to genuinely connect with their customers and community of supporters will have a strategic advantage over those who don’t.

As businesses, we should not look at marketing solely as the ability to sell things, but as the conduit for building relationships. Nourishing this conduit requires all the same steps as any relationship building: For reasons both emotional and practical, you have to build a real connection, listen and take action based on what you hear, prioritize the relationship itself, and deliver on the promises you make.

Being authentic and genuine isn’t something that companies can fake. Consumers are smart, and they expect a lot from the brands they choose to support. More than a great product or service, it’s the passion and cause at the core of the company that builds this much deeper emotional connection between the brand and the customer. All of which can be fostered through personal, meaningful, and relevant content.

Always does a pretty incredible job of this in their #LikeaGirl campaign.

At the heart of this video is a powerful topic that attracts the attention of girls (and women) everywhere: the confidence that girls possess dramatically declines during puberty.

Always is on a mission to “champion girls’ confidence.” This is a cause that anyone who watches this video can be inspired to change, but certainly the target is girls and women all over the world.

What’s so captivating about the video is that
Always uses the authenticity of story and the transparency of a behind-the-scenes video shoot to build a powerful, emotional association with their brand. An approach that wouldn’t work if Always was taking up this cause just for the numbers on social. Because all of the people in the video are genuinely invested, the message is delivered with conviction not only from the director but also the young adults who are featured in the commercial; they all believe it, too.

What’s great about campaigns like #LikeaGirl, and others like this that Always supports, is that Always isn’t solely focusing their content on promoting their products. They’re supplementing self-promotional efforts with real causes, revealing their sympathy and sensitivity to things that are important to their customers. If they’re this compassionate on the sociological side, and they actually live up to these expectations when their customers are using their products, the relationship will be easily formed, and the deep, emotional connection to their brand will be built.

Making a connection with personality

What if you don’t have a universal cause like girls’ confidence or a large budget to work with? You can build an authentic and emotional connection with your customers and community even when doing simple things like administering a survey.

In order to improve their video hosting product, Wistia created a “Take a Survey” video, featuring their entire company actually doing the Hustle, in order to collect useful feedback. Remember, Wisita is only a fun brand because they choose to be. The video hosting industry is not a sexy, or an exciting one, however they used their content to show off their personality to build a connection with their customers.

Rather than going with the generic (and more expensive) gift card or iPad raffle, they decided to use something that was genuine and aligned with their culture as an incentive to complete the survey.

This was not a stretch for Wistia. Their personality and natural brand authenticity shows through in everything they do in their marketing. The sincere enjoyment Wistia has in creating these types of videos is infectious and builds an instant, emotional connection with their audience. People loved it so much, Wistia earned their highest engagement on a survey ever. They saw this as a chance to make a connection even though they were asking you to take a survey.

For Wistia, and for companies building an emotional connection in general, it’s not about doing things like this just to market; it’s got to be part of your culture. That’s where the authentic and emotional connection really comes from. Wistia’s customers know that they genuinely care about what they think and they’d do anything, even dance The Hustle, to show their commitment to the relationship. This is a bond that will help them maintain a connection with their customers long-term.

Making a connection in a boring niche

But the thing is, if your company is not in an innately creative industry, that doesn’t mean you can’t create an emotional connection with your customers. You just might have to work a little harder to figure out what will initiate that bond.

Emotional connection most certainly comes from authenticity but it also comes from a shared interest. Both Always and Wisita have a shared interest with their fans. Always sells feminine products, so supporting and championing young women is an easy fit. Wisita is a video hosting company, so educating (or asking for favors) through video is a natural place to make that connection.

In boring industries, for companies who are willing to dig a little deeper for a common interest and also use some personality, there’s just as much opportunity to forge the emotional connection. You can start by capitalizing on Ian Lurie’s Random Affinities to identify the possible interests of your customers. All you need is two random ideas that don’t necessarily have any connection except for a shared interest with your audience.

It’s a great way to show your customers that you have a personality and because you’re working to spark that emotional connection, you’ll have a much easier time building that relationship.

You can also forge an emotional connection by getting involved — both on and offline — in things outside your niche: joining, supporting, or sponsoring community events or causes. But again, the effort needs to be genuine, so pick a cause that you truly believe in and would support regardless of the recognition or positive regard you would earn from your customers. The passion that you feel will be both contagious and attractive to your potential audience.

It’s one thing to provide the opportunity for your customers and community to give their feedback and voice their desires. It’s entirely another to show them you’ve listened by responding through action. When you truly listen to someone, you gain their trust, and more importantly, their respect.

Seamly is a company who uses surplus fabric to create unique and limited edition clothing. They take listening to a whole new level by aligning customer feedback with production. They crowdsource in order to design the next pieces in their line.

Seamly collects the feedback on their website and then begins producing the apparel.

Additionally, as Seamly addresses challenges that arise during production, they provide their audience with an opportunity to participate in making decisions that ultimately affect them.

Listening at this level will not only make a difference in Seamly’s products (and their sales), but in the relationships they have with their customers. Being human andshowing their customers that they’ve been heard will build a deeper and lasting connection with the company and their brand.

When you make great things, and you connect with your customers on this level, they love you. They write about you. They tell their friends. They do the work for you.

The thing about listening is that it’s not just about interaction. It’s about providing the opportunity for actual human people to participate in your company’s market research. Seamly is focusing on what their customers actually need rather than just following a fashion trend. They’re not designing their clothes based on what a focus group put together with an ad agency in New York. They’re not allowing the fashion world to dictate. They’re creating and detailing garments that their actual customers like.

Seamly’s approach works because they’re listening to their customers and giving them exactly what they need. That makes Seamly real to them because they’re communicating an understanding of each of their customer’s individual needs. That’s real. That’s genuine. And that’s exactly what inspires trust and loyalty.

Human responses increase sales

There’s a large online bridal retailer who ships thousands of items every day, and on occasion they make a mistake with an order. In an attempt to humanize their brand and listen to their customers (rather than just doing what they, as a retailer, would prefer), they set up a split test to determine which way of apologizing to their customers would be most effective.

To Group A, they sent a $50 dollar gift card, and to Group B, they personally called to apologize. Once the experiment had been executed, the retailer followed up with each group of customers to ask them if they would be likely to buy from them again.

Group B, the group that received a personal phone call apology, was twice more likely to buy from them again. Because they listened, this retailer discovered that a personal, human connection — not a gift card, and not an email, but a real live human conversation — was more meaningful to their customers.

This may not be true for every company or every customer, but finding out directly from your customers what they prefer and then doing exactly that, will show them you’re listening, you care, and you’re worth their money, advocacy, and support.

In his book Permission Marketing, Seth Godin pioneered the idea of content marketing. Create something of value that will motivate people to provide you with an email address. The problem is, we’re competing for attention among so much noise, so earning that conversion has become increasingly difficult. There are over 80 billion business emails sent every week and over 200 millions hours spent on YouTube. Consumers have access to a lot of content, and are weary of another brand sending more emails into their already cluttered lives.

Conversions are a by-product of great relationships. Relationships built on empathy, transparency, and honesty are the ones that last and drive a lifetime of conversions.

The key to creating content that will convert is to optimize for the relationship with the consumer, not the conversion.

About a year ago, Mack Web launched a community building guide. It was our first big “product” and although it took us about 8 months to finish it, we were confident that all of our hard work was going to make a big statement about our company and brand. We thought giving it away for free — no email address and no monetary transaction required — would make the biggest statement of all.

It definitely did.

In less than 12 months, Mack Web earned nearly 6,000 guide downloads (not to mention 373 inbound links). We didn’t require anyone to provide an email address in order to download the guide, but since the guide has launched, we’ve experienced all kinds of amazing benefits including increasing our organic email subscriptions by 50%. The most common feedback we received after launching the guide was that the people reading it couldn’t believe they were giving it away for free.

Mack Web probably could have charged for our guide, but we’re confident that giving this level of content away, no strings attached, helped to make a lasting connection with our audience in the very early and formidable stages of building our brand. At some level, we’ve planted a tiny seed with 6,000 people by providing them something of value for free, ultimately by first earning their trust.

People know when you’re not being genuine and putting on a front just to get something in return. If you’re not thinking of the customer first and providing them with the thingsthey need, it won’t matter if you have an email address; you won’t build a connection or earn the opportunity of a relationship.

There are undercurrents to every digital interaction you have with your customers. Every promotion, everything you say about your brand, everything youconvey about your brand is a promise. Every conversion, every time they choose to buy, download, or subscribe is an agreement. You promise to provide something of value or to care about certain things or to work toward certain goals; they promise to engage with you as a result.

But here’s the twist: each of these promise-and-deliver interactions is actually a negotiation for further, richer engagement. How you deliver on your promise dictates what happens next: do you build a relationship or do you lose a fan?

There are over 150 million blogs online and 500 million tweets per day. The content choices a person has are endless, so you have to give them a reason to engage with you – to deliver on the value you promised, the value that attracted them to you in the first place. You can’t afford to take the consumers for granted and forget that it’s a negotiation, because they certainly won’t. They are constantly bombarded by ads, by links, and by reminders that they have many, many options.

If you fail to remember this, you may be spending money only to drive people away.

In a study Sweezey conducted of over 400 B2B buyers, he found that 71% of consumers have been disappointed with the content they downloaded from a business. Of those 71%, 25% would never read content from the business again due to their disappointment.

This is, quite simply, because they really don’t have to. If you don’t care to fully listen to and empathize with their needs, to provide them the fullest, richest experience, they can easily find the relationship they are seeking elsewhere. Not surprisingly, 49% of consumers who have a bad experience with content said it had a serious effect on their trust of the brand.

A few weeks ago, I did a webinar for Piqora. There were almost 900 people who signed up for the Webinar, and because I was the presenter, Piquora offered to provide me with the email list. Immediately I told Piqora that we wouldn’t have any use for the list. I’m not overly fond of companies automatically adding me to a list I didn’t sign up for and I didn’t want to return the annoyance and drive people away from our brand, especially at first experience.

In fact, depriving our audience of choice goes explicitly against one of Mack Web’s values: human-centricity. If there’s a practice that personally annoys us, using it on others would be a pretty severe break in the promise of our own brand.

Still, it would be a shame to pass up on the opportunity to connect with these 900 people. So instead, Mack Webasked them:

We didn’t get all 899 people who signed up for the webinar, but what we did get was 66 people who, by their own free will, felt confident about connecting with Mack Web this way. That effort was the highest signup month we’ve ever had.

The best part for us though, was getting feedback like this:

Because this is how it could have gone:

We’ve all been there. You voluntarily sign up to listen to a webinar, or download a whitepaper you’re really excited about reading. But then, immediately following, in addition to the content you wanted, you also get spammed with all the stuff you never asked for. Immediate relationship infringement.

Giving readers the opportunity to choose demonstrates respect fortheir needs which makes you human. Then, all you have to do is continue delivering on the experience that your audiences expects so that you can maintain their trust ongoing.

Follow through both on- and offline

Delivering on your promise as a company needs to happen on every channel, not just your website, social, or email marketing. The experience is everything before, during, and after the interaction, and you must meet customer expectations both on and offline.

Kmart did great work humanizing their brand with the ‘Ship my Pants’ campaign of creative TV commercials, but the experience falls flat when it comes to their actual stores.

The majority of reviews of the Chicago, Illinois Kmarts fall below 3 stars. Some even as low as 2 out of 5.

Where Kmart has gone wrong is by treating their marketing and their in-store performance as separate entities. To reconcile the difference between their ads and their stories, Kmart could choose to be transparent about the subpar performance offline. They could share their plans for improvement with their customers. If their customers and community are aware that they are facing issues and trying to tackle them, rather than covering them up with a creative campaign, Kmart may earn their compassion and trust.

Everything you do as a company communicates the experience of your brand, not just your marketing copy or paid ads. Every touch point offers an opportunity to develop an honest relationship with the people who are coming in contact with you. Put honesty and authenticity first and you’ll provide an amazing experience with your brand.

The good news and the bad news

The good news is that all of this stuff is pretty simple. We’re all human beings. We all work with other human beings. We all know that we need to treat our customers how we would like to be treated.

The bad news is that simple is not the same thing as easy. Humanizing your brand, building trust, fostering an authentic and lasting connection with your customers is hard work. It doesn’t necessarily scale. And unless you can tap into some genuine, authentic passion of your own, the connection is going to be a whole lot harder to ignite.

The companies that can do this stuff and do it well are the ones that have, at their heart, a purpose deeper than making money. Maybe it’s something everyone can connect to like
Always advocating for girls everywhere. Maybe it’s something closer to home like providing wearable, unique clothes tailored to your customers’ needs and tastes like Seamly. Whatever your goals, your real passion and drive for that meaning beyond money will keep you going, will inspire you to relentlessly improve your products, and will ensure that your brand is memorable and desirable to your customers.

Which is why all this humanizing stuff has to start from the inside. In order for it to be successful, you have to get the whole company on board and genuinely excited about providing the full human experience to your customers. If your marketing doesn’t come from your core, it’s not going to forge a genuine and emotional connection with your customers, and it certainly won’t help you foster the growth of a community.

Flashy ads can help you stand out for a moment. But for the longest-lasting and most loyal customers, you don’t have to outspend or outdo everyone else. You just have to outthink them and do the simple stuff that real humans do.

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Below are letters written to you all (yes, you!) from both Rand and Sarah.

The first is from Rand:

Dear Moz Community,

Wow. Ten years. It’s been an incredible ride. Through the ups and downs (and there have been plenty of both), there haven’t been many constants in my life—my wife, Seattle, and, strangely enough—you, the Moz community. From my first days on the blog and in the forums of the SEO world, when I was deeply in debt and had no idea how to dig my way out, to the incredible rush of 2007 and 2012 when we raised funding rounds and felt like the sky was the limit, you’ve been there. And in the darkest hours of the past decade, when I’ve felt the most alone, guilty, and insecure, you’ve been there, too.

I get to see many of you in person—at conferences and events around the world. But I get to see you right here on the web, too—on Twitter, in the comments, through my email. Your support, empathy, and unwavering belief that Moz could and would do great things has been a beacon of hope and a challenge that I constantly strive to meet.

A decade is a long time. Few things in our lives or in the world last that long—the average tech startup doesn’t quite make two years. I’m honored and humbled that you’ve stuck with us all that time, and I promise that in the decade ahead, Moz will deliver more and better work in the areas you need most. We believe in making data that others hide transparent and accessible. We believe in delivering remarkable education and software that everyone can afford. We believe that all of this can be done not just without evil, but with real generosity of spirit and action.

Thank you for the ten remarkable years of warmth, friendship, and support. We absolutely couldn’t have done it without you, nor can we take the next steps without your help. I hope you’ll keep holding us to high standards, and telling us when we’ve met your expectations and when we’ve let you down.

With deep appreciation,

Rand Fishkin

Co-founder & individual contributor

Moz

The second letter is from Moz’s CEO, and one of the company’s earliest employees, Sarah Bird:

Dear Moz Community,

Moz is the steward of this community, but it’s owned by everyone who contributes with posts, comments, shares, and visits. Many, many people have passed through the community, leaving an indelible mark. I get emotional remembering the humor and generosity of Goodnewscowboy. I’m grateful and relieved that Dana Lookadoo is still fighting the good fight. I’m STILL impressed with the solid that Rhea Drysdale did the SEO community when she fought a nasty trademark battle on the community’s behalf. I salute all of the folks, and there have been many, who’ve been a force for good in my life and helped us all to take our game to the next level.

Our community is dynamic, but always TAGFEE. In fact, I’ve come to believe it is the truest expression of TAGFEE. People share openly and without a promise of getting anything in return (TAG). It’s a positive and supportive environment to become your best professional self (FEE). I’m proud that the Moz community is one of the few places on the web I’m not afraid to read the comments; I seek them out because they are consistently insightful and stimulating.

Thank you to those who paused here for a bit before continuing on your journeys, and for those who have stuck with us. There are people out there RIGHT NOW who haven’t yet discovered the Moz community, and who are going to help us keep it amazing in the future. I can’t wait to meet them. Without all of you, there is nothing here.

It’s been 10 years, but there is still a lot to learn and a lot to teach. It still feels like day one. The pace of innovation has increased, and the stakes are higher. We strive to share, adapt, and become the most TAGFEE and impactful professionals we can be. Thank you for creating a space to do that every day. Together, we dig deeper and go farther than would be possible without each other. Let’s keep it going and growing for the next ten years.

Hugs and High Fives,

Sarah Bird

CEO

Moz

If you have any fun or interesting memories from the last 10 years, whether they’re related to Moz, SEO, or whatever you think we might like to hear about (we’re feeling awfully nostalgic), please share them in the comments below!

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Like all good marketers, we think carefully about our title tags before publishing new content. Then we just take that carefully crafted title and plop it into the OG tags for social shares, right?

Think again!

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Jen Lopez explains why we need to put in a little more effort than that.

Here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard:

Video transcription:

Hey, Moz fans, welcome to yet another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Jen Lopez, the Director of the Community here at Moz, and today I’m going to take you on a tale of two marketers.

We have the SEO, right? We focus on making sure that the robots and that the spiders are crawling through our sites and can get to them. Then when we want things to show up in the SERPs, we make sure that our title tags are keyword rich and our meta descriptions are super enticing, right? We make sure that when somebody clicks from the search engine results page, that they see exactly what we want them to see. And that’s smart, right? Those keywords are actually a high ranking factor. All of these things that we focus on, we work very hard to make sure that our keywords are at the beginning of the title and that sort of thing.

But then we have the social media marketer. Yes, I drew that. I’m sorry, all social media marketers. I know you don’t actually look at that. We think about the people, right? How are people going to look at it? How are people going to re-share this? And so as a social media marketer, we’re thinking like, “How can we change the Open Graph tags so that people on Facebook and people on Google+ and people on LinkedIn are seeing these things exactly the way we want to see them?” We want to see big images. Who cares about keywords? That’s what that SEO person does, right?

What about Twitter cards? You want to make sure that when you send something in a tweet or somebody tweets your blog post or your infographic, or whatever it may be, that it’s coming across exactly the way you want to see it. You’re thinking about rich pins, and you salivate when you’re on Pinterest and you see a recipe and it actually shows all of the ingredients in the recipe. That might just be me, but in general that’s often what we do.

What tends to happen is people are getting better about using the Open Graph tags and the Twitter cards and that sort of thing. But what we normally do is we take what we have, put in the title tags and meta description, and we make it the default so that it’s really simple. So we’re doing the basics. We’re being lazy. That’s exactly what we’re doing.

We do it on our own blog. You go to our blog, the title that you see on the page, the title of the post, the title that you see shared on social network, it’s always the same. You’re going to see it across the board, and it is time for us to stop being lazy because think about if you did this.

Now let me give you first an example — Huffington Post. I recently wrote a post for Huffington Post, and being a SEO myself, I worked very hard at making sure that the title tag was something that would come across in the SEO world very nicely so that it would show up in SERPs great and it would do all this stuff. What was interesting was, that without my prompting, that something that the Huffington Post editorial team did, is after I submitted my post with all of my information, they told me it took several days. I get this email that says, “Congratulations, your post is on Huffington Post.” I did a little happy dance because now I can put in Google+ that I contribute to Huffington Post.

Besides that, the first thing I did is I went to share it on Facebook. What’s interesting is when I shared it on Facebook, it was not the image that I’d used. It was not the title that I’d used nor was it the description. It was very specific to social.

So I went back to my page thinking, “What the hell, did they change all of my stuff?” No, my title tag and images and everything are still exactly the same. However, they’ve set the Open Graph and the Twitter cards to be specific to social. I had this like “Oh my gosh moment,” when I realized: Why in the world aren’t we all doing this? Why aren’t we taking one piece of content and making it so that not only do the robots see it and do we care about the keyword rich title and meta description that looks good in the SERPs and getting all the schema just right so that it looks right there? Why don’t we do that plus we make sure that the Open Graph tags are great, that you have an image that’s super shareable, that you have a description and the title that can be somewhat up worthy?

I’m not a huge fan of, “This woman wrote on a Whiteboard, and you’ll never guess what happened next.” I really don’t like those, but people click on that stuff. You put a different image, a different image here than a different image you have here, and you make it something. You put a circle around somebody’s face in the background. We’ve all seen those on Facebook, right? They work really well. It’s brilliant. You take one piece of content, and you make it work really well for the robots, and you find that happy place. You get the people plus robots equals love. That’s because you’re making your content that you’ve worked really hard at, you’ve put time and effort into this, you’re making sure that it’s easily consumable by the people who want to share it and re-share it hopefully and make it viral because you want that virality here. But you also want it to be stable, and you want the robots to see it and you want the spiders to be able to get to it and all of that.

So my quest, you have a quest. I am doing this hopefully internally as something that I’m pushing very hard, and I would like to see you step up your game as well. So rather than just keeping those defaults of, “Here is my title tag and I’m going to use it in all of the places,” that you’re going to take the time to write not only your title tag and meta description for SEO purposes, but that you’re going to work hard at taking these and doing really great things with your social meta tags as well.

Below, I’m going to give you some resources to specific posts that talk about how to do this well and how to do this well and then take those and combine them. When you do that, you are going to find that people are going to love the heck out of your stuff. I will be the first one when we get that set up on our site, I will tell you exactly how it’s working for us. So stop being lazy, do the hard work, and make your stuff super
shareable all over the Web.

That’s it for today. I hope to see you again soon. Have a great weekend.

Additional resources

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There is an awful lot of controversy going around for things like guest posts, with techniques being proclaimed dead and blogs being decreed toxic, but the fact remains that if you handle blogger outreach in the right way, you can get a tremendous amount of value from blogs.

Targeted audiences, run by passionate and receptive bloggers; these types of opportunities shouldn’t be discounted. If you take a step back from your link profile, it is very likely to be heavily weighted towards blogs, whether that be as a result of guest posts, editorial mentions, competitions, or just about anything else.

However, while all of the above add value (broadly speaking), they point to a link profile that looks skewed toward just one type of website. Links from blogs can be overcooked, and the reality of being an SEO in 2014 is that it is always wise to diversify the ways in which you get links—irrespective of which color hat you think you wear. You need to be proactive about what your link profile looks like.

We’ve probably all recently seen instances of overly harsh penalties, websites that lookedwhiter than white (especially in relation to competitors) getting spanked. I’ve seen instances of sites getting hit that didn’t even look like they cared all that much about SEO, and yet someone at Google arbitrarily decided they had fallen afoul of guidelines.

Do I think Google is crazy? Sometimes, yes. But I’m not here to complain, because frankly it’s their playground, so I guess we all need to learn to live in it and determine ways to make the most of it—or face the consequences.

My point is we all have to think carefully about the things we do (even if they don’t at first appear to impact SEO) and what knock-on effect that is likely to have.

This especially applies when it comes to content generation and building links. It is easier to get bogged down in the day-to-day and think you are diversifying your link profile because you have a variety of blogs or because you are using different means to connect with bloggers, but from a bot’s point of view those links probably all look quite similar.

Here are just some of the wealth of link opportunities that are out there in almost every market:

Resource pages

Forums

Directories

Professional organizations

Events

Submission-based

Press

The sad thing is that at least one person reading this can probably find one instance of each of the above links being mentioned by someone at Google as “unnatural.” That being said, all of the above, if done right, are highly defensible and would pass the litmus test of “would I still want this if Google didn’t exist?”

Targeted acquisition

The problem (actually, the opportunity, because it means fewer people will bother) is that there isn’t usually a surefire step-by-step to finding these types of opportunities; the process can be quite serendipitous. I know that sounds like fluffy nonsense but there is no substitute for really getting to know a client and their market. This is why we often save this kind of activity for several months into an engagement: That is when some of the really golden opportunities seem to appear—after a few conversations with your contact, some research for a content piece, etc.

It is also likely that opportunities are limited in certain markets. There’s nearly always another link opportunity out there, but to be brutally truthful this process isn’t going to be easy, and it isn’t going to be one of those things where you can suddenly
make it rain links.

In most cases we have found markets to be a series of rabbit holes with niches, sub-niches, sub-sub-niches,etc.—the internet is HUGE, and if you are just focusing on “Keyword” + “Write for us” in your link prospecting, then you are leaving a world of opportunities on the table.

Resource pages

This type of opportunity is likely to form the foundation of any proactive “blogless” link building campaign because there are so many resource page opportunities out there.

You can really shoot for the stars with this technique, though and we’ve secured placements on government, academic, and top-tier websites like About.com. I must stress that this isn’t always an easy sell, because these types of websites don’t link to just anyone so you’ll need to adjust your expectations accordingly particularly if your business or client has only a small amount of value to offer outside of its usual commercial enterprise. It probably doesn’t surprise you that these types of websites care very little for link-baity stuff. 🙂

A common mistake is to adopt the mindset of “I have made this guide on {keyword}, it is really {useful | interesting | identical to everything else on your resource list} and so should be included on your page because it will be good for {your audience | me}”. You either need something completely new that brings diversity to that resource page, or you need to sell the webmaster on the asset you are asking them to link to.

A common approach we adopt is to utilize an existing client asset and then look for multiple angles depending on the type of resource page you are targeting. If you think about, a governmental website, they want to help local citizens, so content about things like public safety is of interest to them. However, there is no incentive for them to link if they’ve already got three guides to the issue you are talking about. If you can find one governmental site that has a section on a specific public issue, though, you can use that in your pitch to another website, offering them a reason to link (because it rounds out their offering to their local citizens).

In terms of finding these kinds of opportunities, there are two main ways we do this:

Digging through an existing link profile (the client’s or a competitor’s) and extrapolating the tactic from there

Surfacing (often) hundreds of opportunities using a combination of prospecting phrases that include a variation of resource, help, further reading, and the keyword

Forums

Who would have thought a type of link usually reserved for the spammer could be valuable?

Well, a number of our clients enjoy mountains of traffic from targeted forums; in fact, in some cases they are the biggest referrers.

Naturally I am talking about the client adding value to the forum, or in most cases (this is easier if you don’t have the client industry expertise and the client doesn’t have the inclination) encouraging conversations about the client within the forum. Tread carefully, as most forums don’t take all that kindly to marketers poking their noses in, but with a modicum of client participation you may be able to join a conversation and highlight a piece of content on the client’s site. By doing so, you might just “turn on” the forum to the wealth of useful content you probably already have there.

Our participation in forums is often content-led, and it is a very low-volume tactic, as there are often only a handful of worthwhile forums in the industry you are looking at.

Directories

A recent study found mostweb directories are dead, and I wouldn’t disagree that most are simply live so they can charge for removal of links. Leaving this type of directory aside, there are a wealth of industry directories and localized business directories that real people actually use. These are the types of listings where you can get phone calls. Regardless of what you think of directories as a link type, that to me is a defensible link that is worthwhile irrespective of whether it is going to have an impact on your rankings.

The US is a gold mine of link opportunities like this, with directories for cities that are relatively easy to get listed on and can actually generate calls and new business. If you are in the travel industry, for example, where people who don’t know the area need to book a car service from the airport, they might use a site likeSantaMonica.com to find a provider. There is that perceived credibility of being listed in what is an authoritative site in the area.

How do we go about finding them? TheLink Prospector tool from Citation Labs is very useful in surfacing these types of opportunities if you use a combination of local and niche-specific phrases. If you don’t want to subscribe to the Link Prospector tool, then it is easy enough (albeit less automated) to do generic searches that include a combination of keywords or geographical locations and the directories themselves often show up. I actually prefer the manual method, as it allows for more serendipitous opportunities to present themselves.

Professional organizations

There won’t be all that many, but as with directories you want to be thinking in terms of niche and location as well as a combination of the two. Especially in the US, there are a wealth of opportunities with local chapters of organizations that you or your client could join.

There is often a cost involved with joining these professional organizations (at least the worthwhile ones), but the credibility associated with it and often the other business benefits for the client hugely outweigh the cost.

We’ve been frequently surprised at how often a client is already paying a subscription fee for a membership that entitles them to a listing but they’ve simply never claimed it! These are very quick and easy wins, granted the impact isn’t necessarily going to be life-changing.

To find these kinds of organizations, again theLink Prospector tool is very useful if you need a quick and easy way to find these opportunities. You might find this list useful (albeit a little user unfriendly to navigate) as many trade publications have a corresponding association. Not always, but hey, it is still a useful resource if you want to find out about trade press.

Events

I strongly suggest you read this blog post onLink Building with Local Events by Kane Jamison from 2012. There is very little I can add to this specific topic that Kane hasn’t already covered, but a few specific points are worth repeating:

First, why would we want these links? Well, you are likely to be getting links on domains that are otherwise hard to get even a citation from, let alone a link, websites like well-respected news outlets. Similarly the links are geographically specific, there is nothing more difficult than obtaining links from blogs within a certain geographical area, because the pool is often really small. So when it comes to “blogless” link building, it is nice to add that local element to your profile, and event-based link building can really help with that.

Secondly, think about the whole process when it comes to event-based link building, because there is more to it than just the “submission to the event section.” You need to consider how you structure the event pages on your website as well as selecting the right ticketing provider (e.g.Eventbrite) for maximum SEO-related benefits (and frankly to ensure a seamless experience for any attendees).

Finally, consider all the angles for leveraging your event for link building goodness, from typical search queries that uncover submission opportunities to looking for footprints within event widgets.

Submission-based

This is an excellent way to maximize the reach of content either through finding or repurposing for a new audience.This guide, whilst painfully cringe-worthy in its analogy to food, is a mostly useful guide to repurposing your content.

I am talking about worthwhile submission-based link opportunities here, though, whether that be making a presentation from a guide to go onto Slideshare or just submitting a podcast to the relevant directory. This is less about the resulting link (Google knows these aren’t exactly tightly editorially controlled), but you can effectively plug into an audience that you didn’t already have access to.

I still get milestone notifications of a guide I wrote for eHow nearly five years ago. I’m actually a little embarrassed about the content so really must get around to updating it but that has had over 10,000 pageviews since it launched. I accept that’s not viral traffic, but it was an extract of a longer piece on my site, and I linked my guide in the section beneath. My guide has subsequently had just over 4,000 visits since the eHow extract was published, which is almost certainly a lot more eyeballs than it would have gotten just sitting on one of my websites.

Eric Ward is a big proponent of submitting content to different places; many of the Link Opportunity Alerts that you find in hisLinkMoses newsletter service are submission-based, but often niche-specific and have a large audience or carry some real credibility.

Press coverage

Is doing PR a challenge as an SEO? Absolutely. It isn’t always an option, because if your client has a PR department or existing agency you might just end up crunching toes. On the flipside, however, we as SEOs are often far better at actually getting the link than a PR exec might be. We’ve achieved coverage for clients on TV networks, offline magazines, radio interviews—lots of great things that any PR agency would be proud of, and that started as a way for us to build some links!

The thing we have found is that most press opportunities present themselves and you have to be a bit reactive (or real-time) rather than proactively seeking coverage. We have also found some success in looking at how and why clients (and their competitors) have been covered in the past. Go into this with an open mind—I couldn’t believe when we found one of our clients had received coverage for the release of a product brochure; my initial thought would have been “who actually cares besides the owner of the business that our client has released a new product brochure??!”… turns out the trade press cared, and would happily cover it. In situations like that you find an asset which even the best of us would have dismissed as little more than sales fodder that can actually be used effectively to garner links.

Incidentally, I would be interested to hear your experience gaining press coverage with services likeHARO. We’ve probably had 4 successful pieces of coverage from HARO pitches, and while you could argue our targeting was off, our pitch was poor, or the client wasn’t a good fit, we’ve got coverage for those exact same clients through all sorts of other means so it truly baffles me when I see other people cite HARO as though it’s a push-button way of getting publicity. Maybe we’re doing it wrong, or maybe it’s just inundated since all SEOs on planet Earth started using it. Who knows?

A walkthrough

It is often easy to illustrate a point with an example, so I wanted to do a quick runthrough of what we might do if we were to handle link building forOntraport, a small business CRM provider. These guys aren’t a client, and were selected at random after going through a list of a few of our providers (we use them for email auto-responders among many other things) I thoroughly recommend their software, but I digress.

Let’s look at the assets they already have that we might be able to work with…

http://ontraport.com/ The software itself is likely to appeal to small business owners, seeing as it has been designed with them in mind. From a link building point of view, we might struggle given that there isn’t a free version of the tool, but as a “suggested tool” on a small business website we might have an angle. The better angle here is that the company is itself a “small business” success story (or at least sort of small; they’ve featured on the INC500 list and Forbes Most Promising Companies).

http://ontraport.com/women/ This one is buried in their footer, I actually found it digging through their link profile, but it is a sign-up page to join an online community for women in business. Ontraport’s COO is a woman named Lena Requist and she wanted to create “The Professionistas” to be a community within the wider Ontraport community. It is such a great idea, and is likely to be a valuable asset for any link building campaign.

http://ontrapalooza.com Their annual event which seems to work a bit like MozCon. I saw details of the event last year but didn’t actually attend, and there are opportunities aplenty with a large-scale event like this.

Here are just some of the opportunities I came up with after little more than 10 minutes of research:

SBA.gov helped me find an office that supports female business owners that is local to Ontraport and that office has a resource page.

The National Association for Female Executives has setup a page to help guide female executives in their career here. Perhaps Ontraport’s Professionista community for women would be a good addition for any women looking to strike out on their own as a means of furthering their career?

Their forthcoming in-person meetup in Santa Monica is likely to be of interest to the Santa Monica Chamber of Commerce in their business event listings: http://members.smchamber.com/events/

The Annual Ontrapalooza event I mentioned was held in Santa Barbara last year, so how about telling local residents about it and getting a link in the process? You can submit event details to the Santa Barbara Independent events section (granted most listings are aimed at general public but there are some specialist events in the calendar).

Conclusion

Ultimately you need diversity in the link building that you do. Many of the tactics described above are low-volume, high-value so are worth investing a bit more time in. Can you build a process around them? Yes, but it is likely to be more of a framework or alternatively very industry-specific because there are so many nuances hence why I haven’t provided a step-by-step.

I don’t think that you should consider blogger outreach or links from blogs to be dead, but as with anything in SEO, there is such a thing as too much of something good. Hammering away at one tactic because that’s what’s cheap or in your comfort zone is only going to get you so far.

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